


Light playing tricks

by SharpestRose



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: AU, Bow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:08:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Real live girls!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light playing tricks

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [bow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/454) by [Hope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hope/pseuds/Hope). 



The poster is old. The colours have faded under the wash of gaslight, the whites yellowing and the edges curling ragged. _Live girls!_ it says, the art evocative of Toulouse-Lautrec's work but gaudier, darker, the eyes of the two figures staring out at passers by in such a way that some pedestrians turn their collars up against the wind and shiver without knowing why.

And some pedestrians stop, and push the rust-hinged door open, and long tendrils of smoke reach out to grasp them and drag them inside. There's a stage, a brass pole that might have shone once long ago with polish but gleams dully in the low light now. The _Live girls!_ are shadow as much as they are form, black shoes with one button strap and black stockings rolled at the thigh and ivory satin corsets which make their skin look china-fair. And is that, was that, a dark triangle of hair between the milk-white legs... or is the flickering light playing tricks?

There are two of them, alike enough that perhaps they were designed as a matched set, dark hair piled in fat gleaming coils above heart-shaped faces, eyes outlined in kohl and mouths in red so dark it's black by candle-light. Sarah and Christine, the poster names them, but which is which nobody watching from the audience has ever found out.

The music they dance to is almost discordant, verging always on the edge of tuneless, played by a man who sits at an upright piano and never looks at the stage. And the _Live girls!_ dance and the people pay to watch, the crowds a warm stink of humanity that's always more impression than anything else, an amorphous audience beyond the dim footlights.

 

Their admirers are a small but devout group, sending satin boxes filled with chocolates or out-of-seasons cherries and silver charms to wear on smooth white necks. Sarah's dressing table smells always of roses, for vase after vase arrives from hopeful suitors. Christine's flower of choice is the lily, and the scent seems always caught in her skin.

 

Tall and short, beautiful and ugly, the men step out of the blur of the crowd for a moment to offer their tokens of love and then fade back into the cacophony, expectant and utterly forgotten.

 

The _Live girls!_ have never worn silver on their skin, and chocolate doesn't thrill them as it would other dancing girls in other places. Never wasteful, the pair collect and keep these useless presents until such a time as they will serve a purpose.

 

Never as brave or pompous as the men who think they're in love, there are the others. Those women who come to the shows are as a general rule younger, poorer, than the men. Kitchen maids and seamstresses and barmaids, whose skin is as brown from work and sunlight as the _Live girls!_ are pale from secrets.

 

These women, who are not old in years but tell difficult stories with their eyes and thereby permit the title of _grown-up_ , will knock timidly on the backstage door when the gaggle of overdressed boys are gone. They are welcomed inside, as the men always hope to be and never are, and presented with cherries and chocolates and small silver charms.

 

They have names like Susan and Mildred and Rebecca. Their spines are supple from bending in the blacking of grates and stretching to reach high shelves, and they lie back on the worn chaise lounge in the corner of the room as if it were a fairy's bower. Incense, the smoke here seems to be, finer and stranger than that of pipes and cigarettes, and the air smells of lilies and roses.

 

Work-roughened fingers are nervous, touching such soft white flesh. _Oh!_ the young women often cry at that first brush of skin on skin. _You are terribly cold, miss._

 _Warm me_ , Sarah or Christine or both will reply, and kiss the cherry-chocolate flavoured mouths. And there will be more kisses, and wicked clever hands slipped up under petticoats.

 

Years later, old grandmothers will remember the flicker of gaslight on those nights, and trace a pale scar on the inside of their wrist with a care-worn thumb. Christine's letter-opener has a handle of ivory, carved with strange shifting shapes and a snake biting its own tail.

# Ouroboros, she names it. She opens letters with it, as well as all its other uses, and folds the discarded paper into delicate origami shapes. She could fill her room with paper cranes and lilies if she so chose, birds and flowers with deceptive, lethal edges.

 

Sarah prefers to use the cut-throat razor she has owned for so long even she cannot remember how she came to have it. She sometimes wears it slipped inside her garter, the flash of lamplight catching it as she discards her skirts.

 

Christine likes the wrists and elbows, likes to bend her head and act the part of a gallant suitor as she lets the blood fill her mouth. Sarah seems to have no particular preference for the locations of her razor's work, has been known to trace the curve of an elegant shadow across a naked back or nick at the base of a throat with equal satisfaction. In actual fact, she prefers the inner thigh, high up where the saphenous and the femoral veins join. These names for blood vessels thrill her, make her think of other words like _sappho_ and _diaphanous_ and _feminine_ and _immoral_ , such apt descriptions for the taste.

 

Some of their dressing-room visitors shall, as suggested, go on to be grandmothers with lace-filmed memories of late nights and cherries and the edge of a blade. Perhaps they will find happiness, in their long-lived years in the light after the dawn has come. Perhaps not. They will never say either way. Others will fade, like last night's roses, decorating the back-stage until their bloom vanishes and no colour remains. Perhaps these particular women are bitter, at the end, at the fate they've been handed. Perhaps not. The dead don't share confidences.

 

And others still become paper lilies, white and smooth and never-wilting. Sharp-edged and safe-seeming. No longer work-roughened scullery girls, these new-made night flowers go off into the world to seek their fortunes. None stay at the dance hall for very long, except of course for the two _Live girls!_.

 

They have second-skin dresses with clever invisible hooks to keep them closed, coats of incomprehensibly fine leather dyed to midnight blue. They walk down avenues and promenades together in the hours so late as to be early, sharing whispered and secret jokes under expensively made cloche hats. Perhaps, passers-by think, they are foreign, beauties from Russia or some other icy land, their skin so cold and white due to the memory of snow.

The snow in this part of the city is often brown slush on the pavement, soaking up the stains of the night and melting from the residual sin. A mongrel dog chained to a fence as a guardian worries at an old bone, gnawing where there is no meat left. One of the _Live girls!_ tosses a small fresh thing down, a warm thump on the cold cobbles. The dog whines and backs away from it, knowing by instinct that this meal is tainted and should not be touched. The damage is done, though, and nobody will look so closely at the tooth-marks as to see they do not belong to this mutt when the stray finger is found in the morning. The dog will be put down as a danger, no reason to waste a bullet when a knife will do just as well.

Obviously, the dark and ragged poster has been on the wall for a very long time, the paper glued down by damp and rain. But nobody can ever remember seeing it by daylight, somehow.


End file.
